Facebook bug set 14 million users' private posts to public

Facebook’s series of privacy gaffes seem to be unrelenting. According to a CNN report, the social media platform suffered from a glitch that caused changes to the privacy settings of its users. The bug which was active on the platform in May changed the suggested privacy settings of some users to public, potentially making visible to everyone posts and updates meant for just friends.

The company is now notifying 14 million users who were possibly impacted by the bug to “review your posts”. The bug occurred when Facebook when a new “featured items” option, which highlights a user’s activity on their timeline, went live on May 18. Facebook explained in a statement that featured items are meant to be public, the company accidentally extended settings to all of the users’ posts. The company began rolling out a fix on May 22, and completed the process by May 27.

In a statement, the Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said, “Out of an abundance of caution we are letting anyone affected know today and asking them to review Facebook posts they made during that time.”

The bug has been fixed, all the posts have been restored to their original privacy settings. The notification from Facebook also provides a link to review affected posts.

Facebook is already under fire for privacy violations

The bug could not have come at a worse time — it has been only two months since it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-linked political campaigning firm had access to the data of 87 million Facebook users. Data belonging to over half a million Indians may also have been accessed. A New York Times report published earlier this week unveiled that Facebook had data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 hardware manufacturers including Apple.

The government of India has sought an explanation from Facebook over reports of the latter’s data sharing partnerships with phone makers. According to a report on the Economic Times the social media company has been given time till June 20 to respond to the notice issued by the government.